The Marshmallow That Ate Me

It’s my anniversary today. Martha and I married on a bright October afternoon in New York City twenty-six years ago, which means I’ve now been married for nearly half my life. Gross. This is my first marriage and I feel like I’m running out of time if I want to move onto a second. Thankfully, I do not. We’ve had a good run so far and I think I will press my luck.

The longer I am married, the more grateful I am for my marriage, which feels more precious to me with every year. I don’t exactly know to explain the nature of that preciousness except to say that marriages are fictions and contrivances – they only exist because people choose to believe in them – but as the years pass, that fiction becomes more real to me than the stuff with which we’ve filled our homes and our lives. The things become more vaporous to me as the years pass, but the relationship, intangible by definition, has taken on a solidity I never anticipated.

My marriage has now reached an age where people ask me for its secret. There is none. We remain married, not because we are the possessors of some magical relationship-preserving amulet, but because we both care enough about it to keep working at the damned thing. There were years, especially when the kids were little, when both of us feared we wouldn’t be able to keep it together. But we did, no thanks to our children. If we had divorced, it would have been their fault and I would have made sure they understood that fact.

If there is a secret to a long marriage, I suspect it has something to do with forgiveness. I don’t mean that marriages are naturally contentious, but every marriage – every real relationship – will have bad moments. And, inevitably, you will handle those bad moments badly. Because we are stupid, stupid people. And we say and do stupid, stupid things. That stupidity manifests itself most readily when the relationship it is at its youngest or when the people within it are at their most strained.

The people we lash out at in those moments tend to be the people we love the most. It took me years to understand this phenomenon. It wasn’t until I had a teenaged daughter that I figured out that the reason she was being so awful to us wasn’t because she hated us, but because it was with us that she felt safest. She felt free to express all of her anxiety and frustration and generalized teenage shittiness to us, her parents, because she knew we would never reject her. I think something similar happens, at times, between spouses.

Younger days.

Hopefully by the time you’re married, you’ve learned to regulate your emotions somewhat better than a teenager, but we all go through unenviable moments. I have said some terrible things to my wife and she has more than returned the favor. When we argue, she tends to lash out, I tend to pull in. Entire weeks may go by when we cannot stand the sight of each other, but time has taught us both that relationships have rhythms. Maybe “orbits” is a better word. We are captured by each other’s gravity. Sometimes nearer, sometimes farther away. But always together in this dance. I feel her presence nearly as keenly as I feel my own.

For that dance to continue, one must learn forgiveness. Not just of one’s partner, but of one’s self. And now, just as I changed the word “rhythm” to “orbit,” I wonder whether I should change the word “forgiveness” to “acceptance.”

Yes, I think that might actually be more apt. Forgiveness is, of course, important. But forgiveness implies fault and oftentimes in a marriage, the problem isn’t that anybody is “wrong,” merely that each party isn’t making themselves understood. This might happen for a variety of reasons, the most likely of which is that the person isn’t being understood because they don’t understand themselves. If we are a puzzle to our partners, it’s usually because we are a puzzle to ourselves.

If this is all starting to sound a little therapy-ish, I apologize, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that, too often, what we see wrong in the other person has little do with them and much to do with our own faults. The acceptance I’m speaking of isn’t always about accepting your spouse. More often than not, it’s about accepting yourself. Which, at least in my case, is the harder part. Neurosis makes up the third wheel in our particular throuple. Why she has endured me is probably as much a mystery to me as why I have endured her. The truth is, I just love her.

It is our spouse who knows us and who, despite knowing us, has agreed to invest their hearts. That’s quite an investment to make, and one we shouldn’t take for granted. We’ve done the same for them and we shouldn’t take that for granted, either. That decision, to enter a marriage, is always made with optimism. Each day within a marriage is a small realization of that hope. Over time, those small, daily victories add up to something profound. It’s hard for me to categorize the nature of that profundity, but I know it’s qualitatively different than a profound thought or a profound deed.

This is a softer and squishier kind, the difference between a diamond and a marshmallow. If I had to guess, I suspect that part of the reason we’re still married is because of our marriage’s malleable nature. Over the years, it’s changed because we’ve changed. We are not entirely the same people who recited vows to each other that afternoon in New York.

We’ve been through so much, together and individually. We’ve lived lives together and apart. Our dreams have changed. Our health has changed. Our finances have changed. We’ve had children. Adventures. We’ve had fights - many fights. We’ve told each other things we’ve never told anybody else and I’m sure we’ve held secrets from each other out of shame or fear or embarrassment. So be it. We are more than our individual selves in our marriage, but we are still our individual selves. We have different wants, different needs, different ideas about the world and those who inhabit it. But we also have a third identity, I think, and that is the identity of this marriage.

The cliché about nobody knowing anything about a marriage except the people within it holds a lot of truth. Which is why it’s so difficult talk about it. How does one encapsulate twenty-six years, or even one year? How does one explain those gravitational force that keeps us circling each other? Ours is not a “perfect marriage.” I don’t even know what a perfect marriage would look like. Boring, probably. Nor is ours a “timeless love story.” I don’t know what a timeless love story would look like, either. Probably one of those annoying Christian couples on Tik-Tok. I’ll take my messy marriage over their manicured ones any day.

No. We’re just two people who love each other and choose, every day, to continue loving each other. Maybe that’s all it is. The realization that love isn’t something that happens. It’s something you do. We’ve chosen to love each other for twenty-six years. Will we make it to twenty-seven? I like our odds. Tonight, we celebrate at our traditional anniversary spot. Tomorrow, we will wake up in bed together, another small realization of the hope I had when I got dressed on that bright October day, the unusual weight of two bright rings nestled in my pocket.